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Using Mind Maps for Speeches and Presentations

Today I wanted to talk to you about using mind maps to prepare your speeches and your presentations. Have you ever given a speech in class before, or a presentation? It's a little difficult.

You are down there by yourself, or maybe with a group, and you are in front of 20 to 40 students and you have to explain the topic that you've been given, or that you have decided upon.

Now, obviously, you are going to have to prepare yourself for this. Mind maps are a great way to do that.

If you are not assigned a topic, a mind map can actually help you decide on a topic because it can help you brainstorm in such an easy way. Due to to how mind maps are made, you can freely think and your ideas can freely flow so that you can come up with the best topic for your presentation or speech.

Not only that, but a mind map will help you to organize your speech because as you create the mind map, you are creating a natural outline.

Or if you don't want to do the outline in the way you create the mind map during the brainstorm, you can change it around to organize it the way you want.

Now as you are doing this, you are also creating speech notes. So as you create your mind map, you can take that with you to your speech or presentation and they become immediate notes to help spark your memory and you will know exactly what you want to talk about and when.

Here is an example of what I mean and how it can help you in your speeches and presentations.

It is a free service. I highly recommend it because it is easy to use and it's very, very, very helpful when doing mind maps on your computer. You can of course, do this by hand, but I like to use the computer.

So if you are organizing your speech, or brainstorming, you start with the main topic or main idea in the center and then you let your thoughts freely flow and you just make main point, after main point or if you are brainstorming, it is idea after idea, after idea.

And don't worry about organization or logic. Just let it all freely flow out onto the page.Once you are done, you can go ahead and organize this however you want.

And that is the beauty of doing it on the computer. It is much easier to organize. You can organize this however you want once you are done.

After you have organized this, take your main topic and these sub-points immediately become the main place that you need to talk on. Then their subtopics are details are for each main point you want to talk on .

As you can see, a mind map naturally becomes speech notes, very easily. It makes it so easy to create the speech because you're ideas are able to freely flow and you are able to easily create a cohesive, logical, and useful speech and presentation that will be helpful to the audience you speak to.

After you are all done organizing this, they have this little print button up here you can use to print of this page and take it with you to your speech as your speech notes. Works out fantastic.

If you aren't using mind maps to brainstorm your speech topics and organizing, start now. This also works well for research papers, five paragraph essays and things like that. I hope this has been helpful to you, and good luck on your next speech!